Citrix Taps 10-Year Vet As New Americas Channel Chief

Mike Fouts, a ten-year Citrix veteran who took over Monday as the company's Americas channel chief, says he intends to make it easier for partners to work more closely with the Citrix sales organization.

"After spending the last 15 quarters managing a field sales organization, I fully appreciate the importance of alignment and field engagement," Fouts said in a Monday blog post announcing his appointment. "It’s important to me that we increase our focus on identifying and implementing strategies to improve that alignment between our partners and internal sales teams."

Fouts, who was previously director of sales and services for the Southeastern U.S. region, succeeds Craig Stilwell as senior director of Americas channels and field operations. Stilwell, an 11-year Citrix veteran who had been that role since 2003, is now Citrix's vice president of sales for the Americas Southeast region.

In the blog post, Fouts professed to being "no stranger to the channel", noting that one of his prior roles at Citrix involved oversight of channel development and recruiting.

In addition to leading Citrix's marketing teams in the Americas, Fouts said he'll "work closely with the Citrix channel to enable virtualization and cloud computing."
More specifically, Fouts said Citrix intends to get channel partners more involved in selling desktop virtualization to the SMB market.

Citrix last month introduced an SMB-focused partner certification at Synergy Barcelona, and its acquisition in May of desktop virtualization vendor Kaviza provides an SMB-focused complement to XenDesktop and XenApp, he said.

Doron Kempel says selling hyper-convergence can be challenging for solution providers, but success will come from taking business from competitors that are unprepared or hesitant to embrace the technology.